The Powell Endorsement Doesn’t Matter

Michael Tomasky wants us to believe that Powell’s Obama endorsement is significant:

Ask yourself this. Is there really anyone out there in America who would listen to Ross Perot who was thinking of voting for Obama and will switch to Romney? No. There is no Perot/Obama crossover audience. But are there people out there who are still undecided but for whom Colin Powell’s view would be something they’d take into consideration? Of course there are. Many many thousands of them.

As a general rule, endorsements don’t matter very much. The endorsements of has-been presidential candidates and former Secretaries of State are even less important. There might be some former Perot voters that supported Obama in 2008, but I doubt that Perot’s endorsement of Romney matters to them. Powell has a high favorability rating, as former and current Secretaries of State tend to do for some reason, but I doubt there are any otherwise Republican-leaning and undecided voters that will be swayed by what Powell said. There are many moderate Republicans and independents that will prefer Obama to Romney, but it’s likely that they have been supporting Obama for most of the year. Powell’s endorsement won’t be a cause of moderate Republican and independent support for Obama. It is a reflection of weak support for the Republican ticket among moderates. The voters most likely to take Powell’s endorsement into consideration are also probably the ones that were going to support Obama anyway.

Besides, it’s not as if Powell’s endorsement comes as a surprise. On foreign policy alone, Romney has gone out of his way to make himself unacceptable to someone like Powell, and there are enough other disagreements on domestic policy that it would have always been a stretch for him to justify backing Romney. If he were going to endorse Romney, he presumably would have done so on foreign policy and national security grounds, and Romney’s campaign this year made it impossible for him to do that. Voters that would take Powell’s criticism of Romney’s foreign policy seriously have already reached a judgment about Romney’s readiness to be president, and I suspect the vast majority of them already reached the same conclusion Powell did. The endorsement is an indication of Powell’s ongoing alienation from his party, but other than that it just isn’t that important.

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24 Responses to The Powell Endorsement Doesn’t Matter

Anecdata but I had undecided friends in 2008 who were definitely impressed by Powell’s endorsement of Obama.

Voters that would take Powell’s criticism of Romney’s foreign policy seriously have already reached a judgment about Romney’s readiness to be president, and I suspect the vast majority of them already reached the same conclusion Powell did.

Is this the right question? Are we talking about people who know what Romney stands for on foreign policy and what Powell stands/stood for, or are we talking about people for whom Powell is an Important, Serious man who is doing Bipartisanship. Two weeks out from the election, and talking about a dude who’s credibility has been rendered just a tad bit suspect, I would assume it has to be the latter.

That said, I’d say (and sincerely hope) that there aren’t enough of those people to influence the election.

Powell is more than a secretary of state. He is one of the few generals who can be considered a “winner” who is still on the scene–someone the public would respond to more favorably than say Wesley Clark or David Petraeus. I agree this is not a big deal but it does dominate the media cycle for the better part of a day. If Romney is behind, that means that the better part of a day is wasted as everyone talks about Powell backing Obama.

I take strong exception to your characterization of Powell as a “has-been presidential candidate.” “Never-was presidential candidate” would be more accurate, putting him in the same category as Mario Cuomo and Donald Trump, two other luminaries known for their reluctance to toss their hats in the ring.

As far as Powell endorsing Obama, he must really approve of the way Obama applied the Powell Doctrine to Libya, as well as to expanding the war in Afghanistan. As far as I am concerned, Powell’s role in selling the Iraq war to the U.N. and the American public will forever tarnish his reputation.

Read the post again. “Has-been presidential candidate” in that sentence referred to Perot, whose endorsement Tomasky mentioned by way of comparison with Powell’s. That’s why I paired the “has-been” with the former Secretary of State. Powell’s reputation has been severely damaged by his role in selling the Iraq war. That’s another reason why his endorsement shouldn’t matter. Powell was willing to support Bush twice, but can’t bring himself to endorse Romney. That’s quite the vote of no confidence.

Had Romney been able to land Powell’s endorsement, it would have been a serious blow to Obama’s chances in at least a couple ways. Losing the support of a seemingly ‘moderate’ voice would have aided the appearance of Romney’s move to the center and fed R’s narrative of O’s collapsing foreign policy. A night or two of Powell’s face on the nightly news (and in ad’s) expressing disappointment in O would have been helpful in the very close swing states.

Let’s be clear. His cheif intelligence aide Greg Thielmann resigned due to Powell’s UN speech wherein, as Thielmann said, Powell did not merely “sell” he told willful lies about the nature of the WMD intelligence.

“Powell was willing to support Bush twice, but can’t bring himself to endorse Romney. That’s quite the vote of no confidence.”

Well, he got appointed Secretary of State and his son Michael got appointed Chairman of the FCC as a result of his first endorsement. It would have been very bad form to not endorse Bush a second time, while he was still Secretary of State and his son Chairman of the FCC. I think you are also not making allowance for the racial identity Powell shares with Obama as an explanation for his endorsement of Obama twice. Somehow this supposed Republican could not bring himself to endorse either McCain or Romney. Speaks volumes, not about Romney, but about Powell.

It should be extremely easy for a Republican not to endorse McCain or Romney. As far as conservatives or partisan Republicans should be concerned, they are both bad standard-bearers. I wouldn’t rule out race as one factor among many, but it just seems obvious that Powell considers the foreign policy of both McCain and Romney to be horrible. That probably relieves him in his mind of any partisan obligation to support them.

I think the endorsement matters to independents who are not satisfied with Obama’s first term, are upset over the killings in Benghazi, but unsure about Romney. This group will be comforted knowing the General supports Obama. It just may have enough impact to put Obama over the top in Virginia, Nevada and Ohio.

“But it says to me that Powell thinks a Romney administration foreign policy will be in thrall to the same creeps who sent him to the UN armed with lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.”

I seem to recall that Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage made a big show of going to the CIA and spending three days going through the intelligence about Iraq with a fine tooth comb. It was that effort which formed the basis of Powell’s presentation to the U.N. “conclusively establishing” that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Six moths after his speech to the U.N., the AP had a devastating piece that demonstrated that virtually every point Powell made at the U.N. did not hold up to scrutiny.http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0811-09.htm:

Published on Monday, August, 11, 2003 by the Associated Press
Powell’s Case for Iraq War Falls Apart 6 Months Later
by Charles Hanley

The most detailed U.S. case for invading Iraq was laid out Feb. 5 in a U.N. address by Secretary of State Colin Powell. Six months later, months of war and revelation, the Powell case can be examined in a new light, analyzed here by an AP correspondent who was in Baghdad, Iraq, when Powell made his case for war.”

Has Powell ever actually renounced his advocacy of the Iraq invasion? I ask because, if memory serves, Pat Buchanan noted, in his column on Powell’s 2008 Obama endorsement, that Powell’s stated positions on the major issues, including Iraq, were closer to McCain’s views rather than Obama’s — thus leaving race as the major reason behind the endorsement.

Is my memory faulty? Did Powell say, in so many words, “I was wrong,” and I missed it?

And one of Powell’s top aides says he felt betrayed and wanted answers from the CIA and DIA. A top CIA man said he warned Tenet that Curveball was unreliable, and the Germans who had interviewed him passed along his story info with the caution that he was a flake.

But he has now admitted that he lied to topple the dictator, in an interview with the Guardian.

Honestly Powell makes me a lot angrier than almost any other figure involved in ginning up the war because it’s clear that he knew the causes were nonsense, and he weighed his career options and decided to go along with it anyway.

He didn’t have a gun to his head. He had every opportunity to say, “No, wait, this is wrong.” And he didn’t, and now, as much as it clearly angers him, he has to deal with it.

Lips Moving, as I recall, Curveball was an informant of the German intelligence, and German intelligence refused to allow U.S. intelligence to interview him. I find it remarkable that Powell didn’t take that into account when he “vetted” the intelligence supporting the case against Saddam Hussein and that he placed so much support on Curveball’s claims in his famous U.N. speech. We apparently went to war on the basis of unverified intelligence provided by a foreign intelligence service. As it was, there were still plenty of skeptics in our intelligence services regarding the testimony of Curveball.

Of course, there was also the great hoopla Powell made in his U.N. speech about the “aluminum tubes” which were ostensibly to be used in Iraqi centrifuges, even though those tubes were in the exact measurements used in making rockets and were completely unsuited for use in centrifuges. I remember reading front page articles in the NY Times written by Judith Miller (very close friend of Richard Perle) and Michael Gordon pushing the false story of how the tubes could be used only for centrifuges and then turning to the deep inside pages of the same paper (A-13) to read that the intelligence branch of the State Department deeply agreed with that assessment. I find it very interesting that Powell chose to ignore the correct intelligence provided by his own department and swallowed whole the erroneous intelligence pushed by the CIA. For a thorough debunking of the aluminum tube claims, read the excellent piece written by David Albright, a notable anti-proliferation expert, in December 2003. http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/IraqAluminumTubes12-5-03.pdf

What you’ve got here is Powell the man and Powell the symbol. Powell the man is a self-interested politician who’ll do the right thing if he doesn’t have anything to gain by doing otherwise. Powell the symbol is the GOP’s Exhibit A for its see-we’re-not-all-racists case, and the way the party is going, probably its last chance at having one of his stature.

Tbatron’s suggestion that Obama’s race is a factor in his endorsement seems unfair to Powell; as Tbatron himself noted, he owed Bush father and son. He didn’t owe McCain, he doesn’t owe Romney, and he doesn’t owe Obama. If racial solidarity were important to him, he wouldn’t have become a Republican or a Bush toady in the first place.

“If racial solidarity were important to him, he wouldn’t have become a Republican or a Bush toady in the first place.”

Well, Powell certainly characterized himself as a Republican and benefitted greatly from the honors bestowed on him (and his son) by the Republicans, starting with Nixon (appointed White House fellow). He received his second, third and fourth stars from Reagan and Bush, was an assistant to Cap Weinberger at the Pentagon, was named National Security Advisor by Reagan, and was named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
byBush. He certainly has profited handsomely by his association with the Republican Party. At the very least, he should have maintained silence about his presidential preference in 2008 and 2012. In the end, I don’t think it will matter much since he has been so thoroughly discredited by his association with and selling of the Iraq war through his ridiculous speech at the U.N. “making the case” against Saddam Hussein.